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My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

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Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#61

Post by mmphosis »

SO seems like less of a discussion board, and more of a snapshot in time: 2009 seems about right. Once the so-called "moderators" started deleting, editing and locking most of the answers, I was definitely discouraged from contributing. There WAS some gold buried in some of the less upvoted posts and comments, but "no soup for you."

One other little note, and don't know if anyone else noticed this, but SO is somehow biased a bit towards Microsoft. It's no big deal, but I thought I would mention it. http://blog.codinghorror.com/giving-up-on-microsoft/

As SO fossilizes, I think there might be an opportunity to create a new programming QA site.

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#62

Post by InclinedPlane »

jofer wrote: post #27

First off, a caveat: I'm about to complain about a lot of people I respect and rather like. I'll probably take a lot of heat for it, but it needs to be said. I feel like a lot of the closing of niche questions these days comes from the chat communities. (By "chat", I mean: http://chat.stackoverflow.com/ ) There's a huge rash of "cv-pls" in the chat rooms. I don't have a problem with it in general, but the culture aro…

The problem is that the people who originally headed the community and drove the site have checked out. That means that the very serious institutional and design problems related around the community moderation features of SO are not going to get fixed, they're just going to be gamed by the people with the most effort and free time. There are very few checks and balances on abuse of power at SO, even though that's where you need them the most. The assumption is that users with high enough rep will simply be more polite, logical, and kind, without any sort of agenda to propel. That, of course, was a naive assumption which is slowly blowing up in their faces, if they notice.

Meanwhile, nobody at the top cares because Jeff has moved on and everyone else just cares about site traffic and ad revenue (or at least that's my impression).

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#63

Post by monksy »

nvivo wrote: post #2

Even better when you post a question to stackoverflow and a moderator closes it with "this question should be on xyz.stackexchange.com". You remove your question and post it there just to get another moderator saying "this question should be on stackoverflow". It's obviously a great site, but as always most moderators are usually people with more spare time than real clue on how to organize things.

I call that the SU-SF shuffle.

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#65

Post by mschuster91 »

teh_klev wrote: post #45
jofer wrote: post #27

First off, a caveat: I'm about to complain about a lot of people I respect and rather like. I'll probably take a lot of heat for it, but it needs to be said. I feel like a lot of the closing of niche questions these days comes from the chat communities. (By "chat", I mean: http://chat.stackoverflow.com/ ) There's a huge rash of "cv-pls" in the chat rooms. I don't have a problem with it in general, but the culture aro…

The PHP chat room is/was quite bad in that respect and there's a small handful of particularly caustic individuals who go out of their way to spread unpleasantness for less well informed users.

You mean the freenode channel ##php? Oh, I know what you mean.

The problem is that very many people are not able to google and then ask in IRC. On the other side (the regulars), all they see every day is a torrent of "stupid noobs".

And I totally understand everyone who either retires from answering questions or turning into a sarcastic a..hole towards noobs.

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#66

Post by Veedrac »

msoad wrote: post #48

> 6,900 users with a reputation of 10000 or more can delete questions. I have 20k reps and I can't delete questions. This is not correct.

You can only vote to delete closed questions over a certain age.

Eg: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16681587/some-bigger-rust...

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#67

Post by psp »

The recent funding news seemed really strange when I have been feeling like the author for a while. I think SO is going downhill fast and people running it don't even realize it. Joel, where are you? So sad, used to like SO when it came around and now the way it's being moderated makes you want to just leave.

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#68

Post by Veedrac »

jph wrote: post #37

#1 on my StackOverflow wishlist is a way to make collaboration easier on answers. I see many questions and answers where the top answer mostly works, yet buried below there's a much better answer. I see this happening in areas where technology is in flux, such as languages with evolving syntax, or when toolchains are moving to new tools. Collaboration can improve this by enabling subsequent people to add additional i…

What would you look for that's not dealt with by comments and edits?

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#69

Post by jorjordandan »

As users of stack overflow, product hunt, & hacker news, we have to subject ourselves to the tyranny of the upvote. We have effectively banished unpopular questions and ideas. Or great ideas conveyed in an unpopular manner.

Unfortunately, there is no better way to self-organize and moderate large masses of user generated information..

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#70

Post by Veedrac »

_kst_ wrote: post #29
jarrettc wrote: post #22

I've always been uneasy about the fact that Stack Overflow users can edit each other's posts more or less arbitrarily. User A can edit user B's post to say something embarrassing, and most readers will attribute it to User B. I've had this happen with my posts. It's never been egregious, like a user inserting something inflammatory into my otherwise mundane programming question. Most often, the offending edits give t…

You should receive a notification whenever someone else edits one of your posts. If the edit is inappropriate, you can revert it or re-edit it. "Edit wars" do happens sometimes, but they're discouraged, and you can always flag for moderator attention if it comes to that.

Edit wars normally also get automatically detected and pinged to moderators IIRC.
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